Hiram Wesley Evans

Hiram Wesley Evans (26 September 1881-14 September 1966) was the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from 1922 to 1939, succeeding William Joseph Simmons and preceding James A. Colescott.

Biography
Hiram Wesley Evans was born on 26 September 1881 in Ashland, Alabama to a family of WASPs. He attended Vanderbilt University and became a dentist in Texas, but in 1920 he joined the Ku Klux Klan's chapter in Dallas. Evans ousted William Joseph Simmons from power in 1922 and transformed the group into a political power, with the KKK growing to include state governors, mayors, and even the police. Evans preached against communism, Catholicism, unionism, African-Americans, and Jews, although he denied being an anti-Semite. He publicly discouraged vigilante actions, but he led the kidnapping and torture of a black man in Dallas on one occasion. In 1923 he presided over a meeting of 200,000 KKK members, and he led a march of 30,000 KKK members down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC in the largest KKK march of all time, having moved their base to DC. However, D.C. Stephenson's rape and torture of a schoolteacher in 1925 and the Great Depression ruined the KKK, and in 1939 he resigned from the KKK after disavowing the anti-Catholic stance of the group. He was fined $15,000 in a corruption case, and he died on 14 September 1966 in Atlanta at the age of 84.